Deborah Meier is a visionary teacher, author, and founder of successful small schools in New York City and Boston. Harry Boyte, senior scholar at Augsburg College, is founder of the youth civic empowerment initiative Public Achievement and a leader in the movement to democratize higher education.

Dear Diane, Thanks for the opener; the many ways in which those with no background in public education are shaping its future is truly astounding. I'm sure many of our current “opponents” think democracy is served through privatization and market place incentives (read: money). Others would argue that you and I are making too fine a distinction between public and private. After all private publishers of textbooks and test makers (usually the same) have made loads of money off of public schooling. I suspect we came to our work with a definition of public that’s different than mayors Bloomberg ...

Dear Deborah, You ended your last entry with the following comment: "All this leads to my current worry: the threatened future of public education itself. I worry also about the ties that bind my colleagues together through their unions. These two powerful common concerns connect Diane's work and my own. That we still disagree on so many other matters fascinates me; hopefully it will interest others as well." That is a succinct description of our common concerns. Over the years, we have disagreed—civilly—about curriculum and standards. I don't want to minimize our disagreements, which continue. I still believe...

Since I'm writing my introduction after Diane wrote (and shared) hers, I have a chance to make mine a "reply"—to set the stage for our future blogs. First of all, Diane and I have been arguing for a lot longer than she mentions. Diane called me maybe 15 years ago to suggest that since I had been a critic of some of her works, why didn't she come and actually see some of mine—the school I was working in. So we met, for the first time, at Central Park East Secondary School in East Harlem. And we bonded...

Hi, I am Diane Ravitch and I am really excited about the opportunity to blog with Deborah Meier. Deb and I had quite a lot of fun writing an article that was published in Education Week (May 24, 2006) as "Bridging Differences." We started writing the article after we shared a platform at New York University, where we discussed and debated the current era of school reform. We met before the session to hash out what we would say and had the startling discovery that there was a bunch of things that we agreed upon. After the public forum, we ...